These are questions worth asking any buyer — including us — before you commit to a sale.
We wrote this list because sellers who ask hard questions make better decisions, and buyers who can’t answer them clearly aren’t ready. Print it out. Bring it to every meeting. If a buyer gets uncomfortable with any of these, that’s information.
About the buyer
1. What’s your experience with acquiring or integrating a practice? Include any role you’ve had — buyer, seller, due diligence, integration.
2. How are you financing this acquisition, and at what point in the process are the funds confirmed?
Your clients
3. What’s your overall approach to communicating the transition to clients? Who initiates contact, when, in what sequence, and how do clients learn about the change?
4. What changes for my clients in the first 90 days, the first 6 months, and the first year — and what stays the same?
5. Who will actually be doing the day-to-day work for my clients after the transition, and what’s the capacity of that team to handle my book at the level my clients are used to? How will you measure whether the transition is working in the months after close, and how will I know?
Your staff
6. Which of my staff do you plan to retain, and what will their compensation, benefits, and roles look like at month one and at month twelve?
7. What investment will you make in my staff over the first year — training, certifications, growth opportunities — and how do decisions about their roles, compensation, and development get made? Who’s involved, and how much input do staff and I have in those decisions?
The deal
8. What happens to my consideration if your assumptions don’t play out — clients churn faster than expected, integration costs more than projected, the practice underperforms? Walk me through what I actually get paid in a downside scenario, not just a base case.
9. What’s the timeline from this conversation to closing, and what happens at each stage — when do diligence requests start, when do legal documents get drafted, when does money move? Where do deals like this typically get delayed, and how do you handle it when they do?